American Jewish History in One Family
Hosted By: My Jewish Learning
A Conversation with Nicholas Lemann and Leon Wieseltier
Nicholas Lemann’s Returning: A Search for Home Across Three Centuries is a brilliant mixture of history and memoir. Lemann, one of America’s most accomplished journalists, explores his family’s rich history in New Orleans—from 19th-century German peddlers to prominent plantation and department store owners—offering a profound look at the trajectory from Jewish assimilation to Jewish identity, from the anti-Semitism of the aristocratic Southern society of the past to the achievements of the Jewish community in the American south in our time. Returning is a genuinely significant meditation on the meaning of Jewish life in America.
Leon Wieseltier, one of America’s great public intellectuals, who has written for decades about Judaism and Jewishness, here and elsewhere, past and present, will join Nicholas Lemann in reflecting upon the implications of this extraordinary personal quest for all of American Jewry, and together these old friends will look for the light in this increasingly darkened time.
